It isn’t healthcare, though that is a dumpster fire on its own. We HATE insurance companies. They are not “healthcare”. Use the right words or you end up like MAGA morons using things like commie and woke for “thing I don’t like”.
I call it “American health extortion”.
The gangster who will smash up your store if you don’t pay for “insurance” is actually offering “extortion” , because he’s creating the problem he’s supposedly insuring against. In America, the insanely high cost of medical care, compared to any other developed country, is being created (by lobbying legislators, backroom price negotiations, etc) and maintained by the companies selling the “insurance” against it.
It’s extortion, not insurance. At least call it what it is.
I wish there was no cause for insurance at all. Cremation should be free and a component of end of life care. The fact that dental and vision aren’t a part of Healthcare is actually absurd. Auto insurance should be inexpensive and all about property.
My brothers in Christ of the journalism world, nothing was “revealed”. It’s just Luigi did what everyone who ever had a claim denied wants to do. This is not news.
The public response makes this news, honestly. And if you aren’t online and seeing it, the anger might surprise you. Murders aren’t usually celebrated.
Honestly? I’ll take the coverage however we can get it. I am a frequent NPR listener, and some of their more niche programs are covering this with sincerity. Let’s keep the conversation going.
Simmering here meaning molten slag that was once a pan.
I wish I made as much as people who are shocked that there’s simmering anger with American health care system
Those people generally have really good insurance
That’s one of the key issues of tying health insurance to employment: it creates a backwards system where the affluent pay basically nothing for care and those who make little pay a great deal
There’s a weird curve at the bottom because of government services like Medicaid, with these you also pay very little to nothing, but in most states you have to basically be destitute to qualify
It’s one of the most frustrating things about being someone who takes insurance as a career. The people I see who make $30-40k or less? They have 4-10,000 deductibles and pay 10-30% coinsurance after, on top of hundreds of dollars of premiums coming out of their check (that percentage wise take up a huge chunk of each pay). Their out of pocket max is also very high so their medical spending has to be pretty crazy to get to the point where they just don’t have to pay anymore
But the people who make 100k? 150? 200+? They almost always have nice PPOs. They pay $5-30 per visit. They have lower out of pocket max (though tbf still fairly high, it’s insurance) so their copays can go away (but this is uncommon, tbf). They pay more out of their check but not as much as you’d think because it’s usually more heavily subsidized by their employer (“nicer benefits for essential staff”) and given their substantially higher income it’s often much less percentage wise of their net earnings.
So someone says “go see a therapist”. If you’re making 40k a year with avg benefits that might mean you’re now on the hook for $120 a week for weeks or months (or more!) because of your high deductible plan, until you finally hit that deductible. If you’re young and healthy and don’t utilize much you may never hit it just going to therapy. Even if you do you’re still on the hook for 12-36 dollars a meeting after that. Meanwhile the 150k a year tech bro or banker goes and pays $10 a week.
It’s not always like this of course. Sometimes low earners get bad PPOs with high copays that feel criminal ($75 per meeting). Sometimes high earners do high deductible plans because they realize the accounting makes more sense for their medical spending. Or sometimes they work for a company that cheaps out on benefits even though it pays a few people very lucrative salaries. Etc
But it’s also one of the hard issues to solve as a result. In an ideal world the people who have more resources would pay more and the people who have less would pay less. The sliding scale payment system where the wealthy subsidize those who have less. But people are greedy and don’t want to give away their money. And guess who has more political power and also tends to vote more?
Which one are you?
Does it matter?
A fat doctor smoking a cigarettes is still right when he tells you to lose weight and quit smoking
But for the record I make about 50-60k a year and have high deductible insurance. I could potentially make substantially more but I don’t because I have a large number of sliding scale slots to subsidize the care of people who have financial need, at my expense, because the system is bullshit
I have colleagues who do not do this and work the same amount of hours as me and easily clear 70-80k thanks to a combination of no sliding scale and much more draconian no show penalties assuring they always get paid even when someone doesn’t attend (some charge as much as $100 for missed appointments)
Some colleagues curate the insurance panels they’re on so they maximize payment amounts. Some eschew insurance altogether and only take out of pocket payments, usually far more than what any insurance would pay (over $150 an hour). These tend to make over six figures
But even if I was in the latter categories that wouldn’t change that it was correct (although it would make a hypocrite tbf ig). Insurance is a collectivist concept for the greater good and cannot work without someone subsidizing someone else, typically the young subsidizing the old. The only way you escape the need is being healthy forever (unlikely) or being obscenely wealthy (far more unlikely)
Just as an FYI, sometimes mental health gets special coverage. So I have one of those high deductible plans but a few therapist visits are 100% percent covered before normal insurance math kicks in. I’ve been told this is a fairly frequent feature of employer coverage for whatever reason.
This is true and mental health is a pain in the ass specifically because of it.
This is probably what’s called an EAP, employee assistance program. Basically your employer benefits provider provisions a few sessions paid in full. Great for you, kind of a pain in the ass for me. It’s more paperwork, the coding is weird, and the payments are lower (sometimes by a lot, like 40% lower). Not your fault at all obviously and entirely an insurance problem. Just another thing that makes working within this system an absolute nightmare.
However, sometimes this is called a “carve out”. This is different and less of a direct pain but causes so much confusion. This is where your works benefits provider decides that insurance company a charges too much for mental health coverage so they don’t purchase that portion and instead “carve it out” and replace it with insurance company b. This can result in you having specific copays for mental health even if you have high deductible (or even a separate deductible) because it’s essentially a secondary insurance (though technically it’s not considered as such and you would generally never even know the name of the company handling the carve out)
This is SUPER confusing for consumers because when you get your benefits package they hand you a card that says Aetna or Cigna or whatever. Then you see my psychologytoday profile and I advertise I’m in network with Aetna, Cigna, etc. great! we do a consultation, feels good, you send me your info, then I go “ooh, so sorry, turns out I don’t take your specific Aetna plan”. Because your Aetna plan takes mental health coverage and subcontracts it to another company who I have never paneled with.
Sometimes this is because I have never even heard of the company (paneling with an insurance co is weird, sometimes it takes a week, sometimes it takes 10 months), sometimes it’s because their reimbursement rates are a joke (one literally pays $24/hr which doesn’t even cover my overheads), etc. This isn’t entirely on the insurer though as it’s the employer that cuts coverage benefits to do this, although the insurer rising costs year after year is definitely a factor in why an employer would do that tbf
Right? Obvious news everywhere lately. Who is it that is that out of touch?
The people surprised are those that have special policies like government officials that are given preferential treatment with minimal out of pocket costs for almost everything.
Or those that have never been sick enough to have a claim that was expensive enough to get denied automatically by the insurance company.
Brian Robert Thompson is doing far more good for the world as worm food than he ever did as a living man.
You hear what happened to Brian Robert Thompson?
The front fell off.
Simmering? You think it’s simmering? I’m surprised there’s still water boiling in the pot, most of it evaporated into Steam already.
Its at least a rolling boil
The only people who had anything revealed to them is the wealthy out of touch people, and unfortunately that makes up a lot of our politicians from both parties.
Everyone else has been pissed off about it for a long time.
I think we all knew we were pissed off, but we didn’t necessarily realize so many other people were too, especially people we don’t like and don’t agree with about anything else. I don’t think it’s simmering, though. I think we’re at a rolling boil.
I think people can still be surprised by how widespread the resentment is. Things are so polarized and there’s so much focus on dividing us into warring factions, it can be hard to believe that there’s common ground on anything. Especially when there’s so many other experiences we all shared that didn’t lead to a similar understanding.
“revealed”
“We had no idea things sucked so bad!” 😱
Tune in tomorrow when we discover trump’s an unredeemable idiot.
